SAS University Edition Using SAS OnDemand

SAS University Edition is really SAS, and it's really free of charge to anybody with a university email address. To use it on a SAS Institute server for free, go to https://welcome.oda.sas.com . For Mac users, Firefox and Chrome often seem to work better than Safari.

The first time you visit, you'll need to create an account. All you need is a university email address.

Before creating your account, make sure your computer's language preference is set to English; you may need to re-start. Why? When you sign up, the SAS website will detect and propagate your language preference, so that when you use SAS OnDemand, the interface and much of your results file and log file will be in your preferred language. The problem is that if you are using SAS for a class, your professor and TA may not be able to read your printouts. They need to be able to tell what you did, and they need to be able to read error messages and warnings. You can re-set your computer's language preference after using SAS OnDemand for the first time.

If you forget to set your language preference to English before signing up, put this line at or near the beginning of all your SAS programs:

options locale = EN_US;

After you sign up for SAS OnDemand, they will send email with your user id in a few hours at most. To use the software,

• Go to https://welcome.oda.sas.com and log in.
• Under Applications, click on SAS Studio. SAS will start up and you will soon see the SAS Studio interface.
• In the left panel at the top there is a gear icon. The menu will allow you to create a new SAS program or a new folder (for example, a folder for our class, or for a homework assignment).
• Uploading data from your computer to the SAS server
  • In the left panel, select a destination folder by clicking on it.
  • Click the Up arrow above for upload. A box entitled Upload Files appears. Note the location under "Upload files to:", the directory to which the files will be uploaded: For example, /home/u1407221/test. This path is a necessary part of the data file name in the SAS program.
  • Click Choose Files.
  • Navigate to the data file on your computer, and select it.
  • Click Open. Apparently you can select several files this way.
  • Click Upload.
  If you are a Mac user and having trouble with this using Safari, try Firefox or Chrome. I was unable to upload files with with Safari 13.0.4, though an earlier version of Safari worked fine. There was a Choose button rather than an Open button, and it didn't work. Firefox had an Open button and was okay.
• This procedure can also be used to upload text files containing SAS programs. Or, you can choose (new) SAS Program from the gear menu, and just drag the SAS program file to the right panel, where it says "Drag an item here to open."
• Once you have a SAS program, run the job by clicking the little running person icon. You can run just part of your program by selecting that part and clicking the Run icon.
• Save frequently by clicking the floppy disk icon.
• Download Results and Log files as HTML (or PDF) using the icons above the right panel, and print them if you wish from your computer. For Results files, PDFs have form feeds after almost every table; HTML format uses a lot less paper.
• If pdf and rtf output are greyed out and you want your output in one of these formats, there is a menu at the upper right, just to the left of the question mark. It's a circular icon with some horizontal lines and three dots at the bottom. One of the choices is Preferences. Then under Results, you can check pdf and rtf.

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